COVID Nightmares: The Karen, The Mrs. Grundy, and the AWFL

“You see, in this world there’s two kinds of people my friend, those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.” – The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

The Four Three Horsefaces of the Apocalypse.  (Concept via JW, Photoshop via Pugsley, after an idea by Sergio Leone.)

“Okay, everyone, I’d like to welcome you all to this meeting of Karen Anonymous.  Who would like to start?”

I raised my hand.

“Hi, I’m John, and I’m a Karen.”

The voices responded in unison, “Hi, John.”

“I’d like to tell you my story.  Two weeks ago, my family ordered dinner.  Due to the virus, we couldn’t go to the restaurant.  They delivered.  When they brought us the dinner, they forgot to bring the entrée for my son, The Boy.”  I paused.  “The Mrs. called them back and they said they would bring it.  They forgot.”

Everyone in the room nodded.  I could see the tension.  This was fertile ground for a Karening.

“So, the following Friday, I suggested we order again from them.  As The Boy was finding out what everyone wanted, he asked me if I wanted the Bigfoot roasted over moonrocks with a side of fried Dodo wings, which is my usual order.  I told him, sure, it’s not like money is an object, but then I reminded him that they hadn’t brought his entrée the previous week.  I told him we should get it for free.”

I looked at the rest of the KA members.  I could see beads of sweat on a few brows.  I could see a pulsating vein in the temple of one lady to my left.

If you’ve never seen a pack of Karens migrate, you don’t know true terror.

“The Boy said, point blank, ‘Dad, if you want to do that, if you want to call them up and tell them that, it’s fine.  You go ahead and do that.  But I won’t.  You’re being a Karen about this.’  I was shocked.  I asked him exactly how I was being a Karen, and he responded, ‘Dad, this is a small restaurant, not part of a big chain.  The owner just bought it right before the virus hit.  He’s being beaten up financially already.  And now you want to bust his chops over an eight dollar chicken and rice dinner when we will never even notice eight dollars missing in our lives?  No.  I won’t do it.’

There were a few tears, and nods in the audience.  I continued.

“Yes.  I was being a Karen.  I had lost perspective.  And I was proud that The Boy called me on it.  I realized right then:  I don’t need to see the manager.”

Then they applauded, hugged me, and made me king of Lower Southeast Modern Mayberry.

What’s the point of having power if you don’t abuse it?  That’s the last time the mailman will argue with me!

Okay, there isn’t a real Karen Anonymous, but The Boy really did call me out for being a Karen, and I was proud of him for doing so.  But I’ll be damned if I’m going to stop wearing the crown around town.

Karen is pretty simple to explain, and in reality.  We all know her.  Her hairstyle alone tells us a lot.  Karen wants things the way she wants them.  And if she can’t have them her way?  She’d like to see the manager.

That was me over The Boy’s entrée, which was the absolutely true part of the Karen Anonymous meeting.  It didn’t matter that I was technically correct, as The Boy pointed out, in the bigger picture of the world I was absolutely wrong.  The restaurant is small, locally owned, and has generally given us both great service and great food.

Is being a Karen morally wrong?  No, not really.  Karen is looking out for the best for her and her family, mostly.  Would I like to be a husband to a constant Karen?  No, it would be hard to decide who had to give birth to the kids.

Is it bad that the first thing I notice in this picture was the trigger discipline?

In the larger sense of things, Karens are harmless.  Karens stop worrying about most everything after they’re happy.  Sure, they might make noise, and they might be annoying FaceBook® friends, but if the manager has a designated employee to pretend to “fire” when Karens are on the warpath, Karens are happy.  They rule their own little world.  They have no real reason to mess with you, they just want things to go well for them.

Karen memes are peaking right now, so I feel safe in saying that we’ve reached Peak Karen™.  Heck, I bet in a few years it will be safe again for middle-aged women to wear the “can I speak to the manager” haircut without fear of becoming an Internet meme.

The second personality type that the WuFlu has brought to the forefront are the Mrs. Grundys.  Where the Karen is concerned about Karen, Mrs. Grundy is concerned about you.

Who is Mrs. Grundy?

Mrs. Grundy is Karen’s great-great-grandma who entered the English language in 1798.  Mrs. Grundy is obsessed with the rules.  The smaller and more petty and more obscure and meaningless, the better.   But if it were just Mrs. Grundy following the rules, that would be okay.  No.  It’s worse.  Mrs. Grundy wants you to be observant to the rules, and has appointed herself judge, jury, and executioner.  Me?  I say before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes.  That way you have his shoes and you’re a mile away.

The judge told me I was in court for drinking and kissing women.  I don’t think he was pleased when I said, “Excellent!  When do we start?”

Your grass is ever so slightly too tall?  Mrs. Grundy is calling the Home Owners’ Association (HOA).  But more likely, Mrs. Grundy is running the HOA.  She’s and her fellow Grundys are the first to try to be appointed to the HOA and the only ones who care enough to want to be in a cycle of continual judgement over their neighbors.

Why?  It’s likely that they’ve never had real power in life, so seeing the next door neighbor paint his house an unapproved shade of tan gives them the shiver of pleasure in anticipating the pain that they’ll cause their neighbor.  But they’ll wait until he finishes, first.

Is it easy becoming a Grundy?  Sure.  Heck, I was taking a walk in the city where I work (Modern Mount Pilot) and almost Grundifyed myself.  I was taking a walk during my lunch break, and saw a guy in an SUV pull up to a dumpster at a baseball field.  He popped his trunk and began dumping his garbage into the dumpster.

I had a moment where I managed a bit of indignant outrage, but then realized:  it wasn’t my city, it wasn’t my ballfield, and for all I knew the city was fine with what he was doing.  He certainly wasn’t dumping his trash all over his front yard or in the road.  I calmed myself, but I could easily see how one gives in to the Grundy side.

I’ll give in to the Mrs. Grundy side when my badge shows up in the mail.

Mrs. Grundy has been such a feature of culture that she’s a fixture of Western culture.  C.S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Dickens, Barnum, Chesterton, Joyce, Heinlein, Jack London, and even P.G. Wodehouse have all referenced her in their writing.  And now her crowning achievement of recognition:  I mentioned her.

Whereas the Karen just wants the world to fit her expectations, Mrs. Grundy is far worse.  Mrs. Grundy wants the world to follow the rules, which she conveniently knows better than anyone else.

Karens don’t want to wear a mask.  Mrs. Grundy wants to see you executed for not having one, preferably after the torture of, say, having to listen to Miley Cyrus describe quantum physics.  Thankfully, Mrs. Grundy, however is only dangerous if you live in that small circle of control where she can stamp her puny feet and shake her wrinkled fists in rage.  Which is normally within 200 feet (37°C) from where she is at any given time.

But then there’s the last one: The AWFL.  AWFL stands for Affluent White Female Liberals.  And if Karen is annoying and self-centered, and Mrs. Grundy is the would-be tyrant, the AWFL is the Queen of the Left.

It’s also how many times she had to watch the Sesame Street® episode on the letter “O” before she realized that was her middle initial.

What’s an AWFL?

• She’s a 30 year old Yale graduate in Woman’s Studies who marches against white privilege hand in hand with her Harvard husband who works in investment banking while their surrogate-born child is in the care of their illegal Guatemalan nanny.
• She writes letters to the congressman she knew back in prep school about the lack of government spending for poverty while wearing a $380 sweatshirt that was hand embroidered in Pakistan.
• She sends her kids to a private school for a “better education” than they could get in the local integrated school, and lives in a gated neighborhood to keep out undesirables.

A prototype AWFL is the Governor of Michigan.

Yes, this really happened.

Gretchen Whitmer outlawed, based on Corona (and I’m not making up any of this):

• Driving a car between two houses you own. Because COVID-19 hides in vacant houses and might slit your throat because it hides behind the door with a knife to ambush you when you come in.
• The Gretch said that grocery, pot, liquor and abortion stores could stay open, but buying plants was forbidden. Because having an abortion while stoned is a right, but growing food in a garden is a privilege.
• Kayaks? They’re ok, liberals like those and they allow you to buy those cute outfits like Stacey has, and you look so  Motorboats?  A sure sign of the viral apocalypse.
• And science certainly shows that fishing and hunting is the number one way that COVID-19 is transmissible. It’s proven science according to YouTube®.

As I said, I think we we’ve hit Peak Karen.  Karen is harmless, and fun to make fun of.  But when I see her show up all over the place at the same time?  Yeah, that meme is a month from being a Doge.

Keep Doge alive! 

Mrs. Grundy?  I’m on a solo quest to bring her back as a meme.  Mrs. Grundy makes society worse for all of us.

But the AWFL?

The AWFL is probably the single most dangerous thing in society today, and Whitmer is the Ur-AWFL.  And if you repeat “Ur-AWFL” fast enough, you can sound just like a Muppet®.  But Whitmer isn’t a Muppet™.   She has power.  She has money.  She has control.  And she’s not alone.  Even in a crisis, Whitmer’s ideology overwhelms actions that could actually be reasonably put in place to save lives.

And that’s AWFL.

Of the three?  I’ll take Karen any day.